Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
A week after she spoke about the victims of human trafficking at a special event at the United Nations in New York, Ruchira Gupta, journalist from India and a sex trafficking abolitionist, was honored May 15 at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for her decades of leadership in one of the “greatest abolitionist movements of our time”.
Gupta, who was presented with the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, is founder of Apne Aap, an Indian grassroots organization to end sex-trafficking, and editor of the book “River of Flesh and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Fiction”. At the U.N. event tiled “Voices of Victims of Human Trafficking she briefly spoke at a discussion co-organized by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Apne Aap Women Worldwide May 3.
Among those who addressed the event included Cristina Gallach, under-secretary-general for communications and public information.
Gupta said that she is worried that most policymakers do not understand the lived experiences of girls and women who are pushed into prostitution and are subjected to repeated exploitation and violence.
Although the stories in her book are based in India, they speak to the experiences of women around the world. T Ortiz Walker Pettigrew, an American trafficking survivor speaking at the event, said that she understood the loneliness, oppression and heartbreak in the stories, according to a Europa newswire report. “In India they are poor, female, teenagers of low-caste, while in the U.S. and Europe they are poor, female, teenagers of color. The violence they face from their pimps and customers is the same”, Gupta was quoted as saying.
In Northampton Gupta was honored at the 138th Commencement of Smith College along with Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer at the White House, Roslyn Brock, chair of the NAACP board of directors and Stephanie D. Wilson, NASA astronaut, among others.
President of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney paid tributes to Gupta while bestowing the honor on Gupta. “Through you work as an Emmy-winning documentarian and activist, you ensure that the public-and government policy-can no longer ignore the victimization of millions…Your film The Selling of Innocents had repercussions well beyond networks of criminal traffickers that spread from Kathmandu to Mumbai,” she said.
“It led, in one Senator’s words, to the passage of the first U.S. law against human trafficking and similar actions in nearly another dozen countries. Your work resulted in the founding of Apne Aap-a grassroots organization dedicated to a world where no woman or girl is bought or sold, and every girl or woman can realize her full potential,” McCartney said.
Smith has students from 32 countries and 41 states. The past recipients of its honor include Ela Bhatt, Raj Kumari Amrit Kaur, Romila Thapar and Christiane Amanpour, among others.
The post Sex-trafficking Abolitionist From India Is Honored appeared first on News India Times.
